ACM TechNews
'Spoken Web' Can Bridge India's Digital Divide
ZDNet Asia (07/15/08) Prasad, Swati
Since it was launched, IBM's 10-year-old India Research Laboratory (IRL)
has been dedicated "to advance state-of-the-art breakthroughs in IT through
research in software and services," says IRL director Gurudath Banavar in
an interview. He says the lab's researchers are unique in their drive to
develop globally relevant advancements that impact business and society in
a positive way, and among the lab's standout features are a rich well of
talent, a novel innovative culture that permits ideas from a broad spectrum
of scientific fields to cross-pollinate, and a thorough comprehension of
end-user technology. IRL is where the IBM Mobile Web initiative began, and
Banavar says the initiative's Spoken Web, or voice-enabled mobile commerce
technologies, could potentially cross the chasm between India's digital
haves and have-nots by setting up a global telecom Web of sites that are
accessible over voice and established on a telephony network instead of the
Internet. The Spoken Web will allow anyone to create a Web site through
the use of a voice interface, which Banavar believes "will enable the
creation of significant new content in the voice-enabled Web portal that
will help village communities offer their services and products to the
world at large." Among IRL societal innovations the lab director cites is
the IBM Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition technology, which can facilitate
understanding and transcription of human speech with minimal use of
keyboards, and can be advantageous to people who lack computer literacy.
The technology has allowed IRL and the Center for Development of Advanced
Computing to create a continuous speech-recognition system that is Hindi
speaker-independent. Banavar says mobile phones are a more likely
technology for bridging the digital divide than PCs or laptops because of
their portability, their extended battery life, and their
inexpensiveness.
http://www.zdnetasia.com/insight/business/0,39051970,62043775,00.htm
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